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Comedy has no limits.
-Don Richardson, Acting without Agony
COMEDY HAS a long history before and after Jean-Baptiste Poquelin-later known as Molière - began exploring his dramatic ability, but time has proven the ageless quality, critical power, and contemporary sound of his works. Molière defied time, space, and language boundaries, and his comedies have survived changes of style, society, and taste, becoming icons of comic writing.
This essay offers four separate approaches for handling common stumbling blocks in performing Molière. I have selected The School for Wives,1 Molière's first great verse comedy, to demonstrate suggested methods and techniques when needed. The play offers possibilities for a wide range of interpretations. In a unique way it balances the extremely physical, improvisational, dynamic world of the Italian street theatre with the neoclassical, seventeenth-century French elegance and brilliance of verbal wit so typical of Molière's comedies.
The greatest of all writers of French comedy employed most of comedy's traditional forms. As an actor and a leader of an acting troupe, Molière was familiar with every form of stage performance in Paris and the provinces, including the works of other famous playwrights, old-fashioned farces, and the popular commedia dell'arte troupes. Molière found an inspiration for his dramatic efforts in the tradition of literary comedy, yet his works represent a fascinating blend of styles that defies simple classification. Molière's comedies require a sound understanding of the principles of comic writing and the nature and function of humor. Additionally, they challenge actors to demonstrate and incorporate a wide variety of comic acting techniques into performance.
As Andrew Calder put it, "Molière combines subject, characters, dialectic, and plot in such a way that all work together to provide a coherent action which unfolds with regularity and a strong sense of inevitability from the beginning of the first act to the end of the fifth."2 The comedies are classic examples of combinations of various comic writing devices. They often include series of plot complications, dramatic irony, discrepant awareness and ignorance of characters, incongruous actions and juxtaposition of oppositions, surprises and unexpected turns of events, trust and deception, reversal and contradiction, tension built through repetition, chance and coincidences, a considerable amount of physical action, and a comic denouement that brings balance and harmony.
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